Using an expression meaningfully (how else?) implies having a logical place for the expression in one’s life—it is having a life with the expression. When using an expression in a secondary or absolute sense, part of the intention, the point, is to give an image of the life with the expression that we need to have (sometimes for a particular purpose, sometimes more generally). BUT, and this is crucial, it is also part of the intention in such cases that we don’t have such a life with the expression. In this sense, using an expression in a secondary or an absolute sense is nonsense. Using language that is essentially ﬁgurative does not reveal a way of making sense of a situation any more than it reveals the way—the particular way—in which the situation escapes our ability to make sense of it. In other words:, when using an expression in a secondary or absolute sense, meaning is detached from use. In such cases we have only an image of language, and using an expression in a secondary or absolute sense is thus not playing a language game.

There is no such thing as 'the language-game of secondary or absolute use.' That's the WHOLE POINT of such uses.

The longer answer, I guess, is many things. I mean, they do many things when they write poetry, and use words in many ways. Poetry is not defined by using words in secondary senses, although it is something that many poets do, and do more often, and often more creatively than others. Poets are characteristically also often less dismissive, and more willing to accept that there is something there, when they encounter such uses. They are more likely to be aware of the difficulties of expression, and the limitations of the language game—often commenting on this. (These are anthropological, not grammatical, observations.)

Anyway, if poets use expressions in secondary senses, and if I’m write about the characterization of such uses of language, then part of their intention is to capture the particular way in which reality escapes their ability to make sense of it, or reflect about language's ability or inability of capture reality—demonstrating this in practice.

Perhaps this could also be useful: I think that in poetry we often have cases in which language is used in more than one way at the same time. Specifically, we get uses of language (often metaphorical) in which the language is meant to be both descriptive, and at the same time to convey a kind of reflection about the description (sometimes even about the very possibility of description, the possibility to capture reality in mind). The double-usage is meant itself to give pause, and invite a second reading—a re-appreciation of what was done.

These are not by any means definitions of poetry. I’m just trying to describe, characterize, things that sometimes happen in poetry.

Reply

Ed

8/10/2013 12:50:47 am

Dear Reshef,
You say: part of the point of using an expression in a secondary or absolute sense is to give an image of a life with the expression that we need to but do not have, and it is because we do not have such a life with the expression that it is nonsense.

I want to ask about the idea of giving an image of a life with the expression. Is this the same as (successfully) imagining a life with the expression working in a particular way, a way that we need it to work? If so, why call this nonsense at all? Or is it giving an image of something that is not, not really, an imagining of a life with the expression - like one may say that the image of people buying and selling wood by the area it covers, irrespective of how high it is piled, is not yet to imagine a kind of life with the relevant expressions, but is an image of something that looks like, but is not, a kind of life? Or is there another option? I want to say that the first is not what you want because it does not look like the imagining is appropriately described as nonsense. But I want to say that the second won;t really give you anything you could use.

I also want to ask about the differences between the idea of secondary sense and absolute sense. It doesn't seem like I give an image of a life when I say Wednesday is fat. Saying this may be attractive to some people, I don't know - it isn't to me. But it does seem like a dead-end - it doesn't go anywhere. And I do not know how to begin thinking of a life in which there was some role for saying it. Are there other examples of secondary sense that do look like they might give an image of a life we do not have but which are not examples of an attempt to use words in an absolute sense?

Also, if it is not too much to ask: why call secondary sense secondary sense? What is sense-like about it?
Ed

Reply

reshef

8/11/2013 01:20:09 am

Thanks Ed,

Before I answer, I need to say something about the methodology here. I think the only way for me to answer is to find a way to get you to join me into the mess you are (I think) trying to show me that I am in. That is, I know I cannot have what I want. As always, I take my lead from Diamond, where she claims that the explanation of an expression used in a secondary sense will itself inevitably make secondary uses of terms (in her very early “Secondary Sense,” but she also makes a similar claim in connection with the Tractatus 6.4s in her more recent “The Hardness of the Soft”). One implication of this, I think, is that getting others to understand a secondary use is a matter almost of luring them to a place where it would be natural for them to use the term in this way, and then ask them to reflect where they are. So this is what I’ll try to do.

Let me begin by drawing a contrast between cases in which we come to see something in a new light. (1) The first case is of an arithmetical series: 4, 20, 7, 15, 10, 10, 13, 5, 16. It may look like a random lifeless bunch of numbers until you get it, and at that moment it comes to life: you know how to go on. (2) As opposed to that, take the case of looking at a portrait, when it suddenly strikes you that the portrait is looking at you. I want to describe the difference between the cases like this: the life which the numbers suddenly take in the first kind of case is the life of a practice—the life of a language game. Once you get it, it becomes a matter of course how to continue. In the second case, things don’t become a matter of course. It is not like suddenly noticing someone hiding in the dark and looking at you. (I discuss such differences in more details in my “Reﬂecting on Language from “Sideways-on”: Preparatory and Non-Preparatory Aspects-Seeing.”)

The case in point is the second, and first thing I’d like to note about it is that it does not seem to me to have any roots in any metaphysics, or any philosophical wish to give a scientific-like description of the ultimate structure of thought and world. That is, saying that the portrait is looking at you, even scrutinizing you, is philosophically innocent, and natural. The second thing I’d like to point out about this experience is that not everyone will have the inclination to talk this way. Like you, I also find I cannot do anything with the idea that Wednesday might be fat. That means that I cannot use ‘fat’ in this case in a secondary sense. I chose the portrait example because it speaks to me, I can go somewhere with it; and it seems to speak to many others. Another useful example Wittgenstein gives is of the relative darkness and lightness of vowels—e being lighter then o.

But now, and this is the third point, when someone says something like this—describes their experience like that—they can fully realize they are in a mess. They can fully realize that they are talking about the portrait using terms that do not apply to it: the portrait does not have that kind of life. So, for instance, it is part of the grammar of giving a scrutinizing look that if someone scrutinizes one person in the room, they can also turn their gaze to someone else. But this does not apply to the portrait. I cannot think: “The portrait might at any moment now start scrutinizing Bert over there, who looks real guilty.” The grammar of ‘scrutinizing’ here is not what it is normally. And that’s why it is a secondary use of a term.

Now, the typical Wittgensteinian reaction here is to say that all I’ve done is describe another use for the word ‘scrutinizing.’ But I don’t think so. The thing is that it is not that I can use a different word here. “We need this term here.” What I want, when I use the term ‘scrutinizing’ in this case, is the familiar word and the familiar concept. I both need THIS word with its familiar life and grammar, and I need it to have a different grammar. – And you may rightfully comment that I’m trying to detach meaning from use, and that I don’t know what I want. But since this kind of thing happens naturally in non-philosophically fishy contexts, I’d rather alternatively say that what I described simply characterizes the particular structure of our desires and intentions in such cases. So you may call it nonsense, or you may call it sense. If I’ve characterized what happens in such cases well enough, how you call it doesn’t matter much. (I have a paper about this too: “How to Investigate the Grammar of Aspect-Perception: A Question in Wittgensteinian Method.”)

continued...

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reshef

8/11/2013 01:20:48 am

Regarding absolute sense, I need to think more about how all this is connected. But it seems to me that there is a strong connection. I tend to think that absolute senses are a kind of secondary senses. Anyway, absolute senses are typically connected with the “real” meaning of terms. So, for instance, one may look at a Picaso painting and say “Now this is what blue really is,” or say of a novelist: “She is only using words in their real senses.” In both secondary and absolute senses the words take on dimensions of meaning they routinely don’t have. But whereas in the case of secondary senses there is something almost mundane about this, in the case of absolute senses the experience is that we are intentionally trying to get deep to some ultimate meaning. (This is very similar to what happens in philosophically fishy context, but I think it may still be in the domain of the natural and philosophically innocent.)

How unsatisfied are you?

Reply

Ed

8/11/2013 10:11:58 am

I am a little bit unsatisfied, but I have not done a good job of saying why. Here is my attempt: One reason I am unsatisfied is because I do not have a lot of faith in the idea of secondary sense, and (so) I want to resist the association or assimilation of absolute sense to secondary sense, at least insofar as examples like "Wednesday is fat" or "e is lighter than o" are supposed to characterize what it is to use an expression in a secondary sense. Insofar as those cases are supposed to be examples of what use in the secondary sense is like, it seems to me that there are big differences between them and the kind of case you describe, of wanting to say of a portrait that its eyes follow you around the room or the suchlike. The latter kind of case seems much more closely connected with the ordinary grammar of the terms to me, whereas the former cases are dead-ends even for those who do feel inclined to go along with their utterance. What I want to say is that precisely the fact that one can do something with this other case marks it off from the examples of use in a secondary sense. (I think Cora gives another example about which I have a similar reaction, that of a sad piece of music.) In other words, I have a problem with entering into the idea of secondary sense as presented in Wittgenstein's examples. If I could turn that into a question, it would be something like asking for a fuller account of what it is to use an expression in a secondary sense that might make the idea seem attractive or important, not merely an inclination, and also that would bring out the connections or similarities with sense that go to make the term an appropriate one. Perhaps all I am trying to say is that the comparison or identification of absolute sense with secondary sense is not one I find helpful. On the other side of the equation, I am much more inclined than you to view the idea of absolute sense as a problem, as something not to be hung onto even in the realization that it is a kind of confusion, no matter how attractive. In all of this, I may be guilty of a failure of imagination, so the method you want to use to answer my worry is an appropriate one.

reshef

8/11/2013 10:53:28 pm

Ed,

You say that you see a difference between examples like ‘e is lighter than o’ and ‘the portrait is looking at me,’ and you say the former is a dead end. Can you say more what you mean by “dead end” here? – If I understand, you don’t mean by that that it just seems nonsense, because you allow that someone might feel inclined to go along with the utterance. And I guess you would also allow that someone who feels so inclined might also be able to make similar comparisons between the relative lightness of ‘a’ and ‘u,’ or between the word ‘deer’ and the word ‘boar.’ – But if so, might that not be considered going somewhere with these judgments? I can imagine a poet, for instance, taking these things into consideration. Would that count?

It sounds sometimes as if you are just taking it for granted that the secondary sense cases are dead-ends. This goes to define them for you. If that were the case, I would agree with you that there is nothing that characterizes them as sense. As it is, however, senses that I consider secondary are only such that I CAN do something with. (That’s why ‘Wednesday is fat’ for me is not a secondary sense.)

Perhaps you’ll now want to say that once I have found a way to make something with these judgments (e.g. the judgment that ‘deer’ is lighter than ‘boar’) I have given them grammar, and once I’ve done that, they are not nonsense anymore, but they are not secondary either—they are simply meaningful uses: I have simply found another use for ‘lighter’ and ‘darker.’ – Is that what you want to say?

If so, my worry here is that it is impossible to explain what ‘lighter’ and ‘darker’ mean here without reference to what they mean in context like ‘your hair is lighter than mine.’ So, for instance, learning to use ‘lighter’ and ‘darker’ in this new way depends on first knowing how to use them in the other way. And using those words in this way essentially alludes to the other use. This gives a reason to call the use ‘secondary.’ I develop this argument in “How to Investigate the Grammar of Aspect-Perception: A Question in Wittgensteinian Method.” There my primary example is that of ‘seeing aspects,’ which I take to be a secondary use of ‘seeing.’

Putting secondary senses aside, it seems you want to treat absolute senses differently. You seem to think that secondary senses are just grammarless, and nonsensical. And you say that you want to separate between them and absolute senses. But then you say that absolute uses are also problematic. Do you think that absolute uses have a grammar? If so, do you have a sense how you would characterize the grammar of absolute senses?

Ed

8/12/2013 12:00:43 am

I think the examples Wittgenstein gives - e is yellow, Wednesday is fat - are dead-ends even to someone who is inclined to want to say them, and i think they are deadends in that the inclination does not feed into a wider pattern of use - one doesn;t go on to ask how many tuesdays would be as fat as one wednesday, or which vowel one should mix with e to a get something green. Not that one couldn't but one doesn't. The portrait case seems obviously different to me: it might lead into a discussion of how to create that effect, of the technique required to do so, or whether it is more a feature of the setting, or what. I am not inclined to think of that as secondary, as not fully sense like. And the absolute case seems different again in that there is a rich pattern of use, an extensive surface grammar, that nevertheless exhibits a logical confusion. I think I am trying to say that insofar as these (Wittgenstein's) examples are characteristic of what secondary sense is, secondary sense is not what you want. But they may not be characteristic of what secondary sense is, or of what it is for you. In which case, I'd like to hear more about what it is. This is not a deep difference between us I think, but I may be wrong.
ps. Sorry, I think I put my reply in the wrong place.

reshef

8/12/2013 05:50:16 am

I tend to agree that the examples Wittgenstein gives, Wednesday is fat in particular, do a bad service to the discussion. I tried in my last comment to indicate how ‘e is lighter than o’ might feed into a wider pattern of use, as you say, so I’m less pessimistic about the possibility as you seem to be. But nevertheless, Wittgenstein’s examples seem too fringy to make the issue seem like it really matters. So I think I understand where you are coming from.

Nevertheless, the phenomenon still seems to me real and important—and I don’t have in mind Wittgenstein’s examples, but other examples. In particular, a lot of talk about the mind seems to me secondary—talk of calculating in the head (which is another example Wittgenstein gives), and seeing with the mind’s eye, and also all that talk of relations we have internally with ourselves—self-deception, self-legislation, self-control, and there are other cases. (Someday I’ll write the paper.) And if this is right, then secondary senses are at the heart of much of the philosophy of mind and ethics. – I don’t know why Wittgenstein doesn’t connect his discussion more to those other cases, but what he says about secondary senses seems to me helpful when thinking about these other cases. What he says, the grammatical characterization he gives, seems to me to fit.

You talk of what is characteristic of what secondary sense is. I don’t much care if we dedicate the term ‘secondary sense’ only to bizarre uses that very few feel like making—if we take the bizarreness to be characteristic. But it seems to me a bad criterion. The criterion for what is and what is not secondary sense should be grammatical, and Wittgenstein does give a useful grammatical characterization of such uses. And as I said, this grammatical characterization can help with several philosophical issues at the heart of which there are non-bizarre secondary uses of language. It seems to me we are likely to miss the connection if we take the bizarreness to be our criterion.

About the portrait example, and the difference you see between it and the other cases: I share your sense that there is much more to do with the idea that the portrait is looking at one than with the idea that the e is yellow—at least this is how it is for me. As far as I can see, however, this is not a grammatical difference. Grammatically, I think the cases are parallel. In both cases part of the grammar of the primary use is carried over to the secondary use, and part of it doesn’t. So you are right that one doesn’t ask which vowel one should mix with e to a get something green, but likewise one doesn’t wait for the portrait to close its eyes, or tells the portrait that it’s not nice to stare at people, or wonders whether there is something on one’s shirt that makes portrait look. The grammatical similarities seem to me greater than the differences.

Ok. What you say about poetry makes sense (no pun intended). My question was directed in part toward this: "it is also part of the intention in such cases that we don’t have such a life with the expression." Is writing (or reading) poetry not part of life (at least for those who write or read it)? It may be that poets are sometimes trying to point toward the limits of language, but why not also think that poets are trying to use figurative language to point toward a different way of looking at things? (You seem to reject the latter, but I'm not sure I see what precludes it.)

Reply

reshef

8/11/2013 01:22:02 am

Thanks.

Let me try. I want to separate what you say into two points. – I hope I am not thereby missing something important. First, reading and writing poetry is certainly part of life. But there is, I think, some sense in which poetry can take a place outside of life. This is connected to what Cavell meant, I think, when he said that “nothing could be more human” than “the power of the motive to reject the human” (Claim of Reason, 207). That is, the reflexive structure of humanity makes the categories ‘inside human life’ and ‘outside human life’ different than what we may think they are. Human life, that is, is not a domain with borders. Anyway, I’d say that it is part of human life to try to discover human life, and rediscover it. And this goes with a sense that we may lose it—lose our life with words and world, find the place foreign. If that’s right, then poetry may be written from such an attitude, and wish: to rediscover human life.

And this connects to the second point you make about poetry using figurative language to point towards different ways of seeing things. Poets certainly do that sometimes; I’m not trying to preclude this. But I want to say that sometimes they need to do something else first, something more difficult. That is, before giving their audience a new way of looking at things, they may first have to persuade the audience that they NEED a different way. That is, they may need to make their audience consider their routine ways of making sense of things, and find those ways foreign; find themselves not at home in the world. This, presumably, will give the audience the sense that they need something new—that they need the poem. (I think the opening paragraphs of the Claim of Reason, and the opening paragraph of Elizabeth Costello are meant to function in some such way—to problematize humanity, as it were.)

Thanks. What you say helps, I think, to pinpoint what I'm puzzled (or puzzling) about--perhaps a certain ambiguity in the notion of "life." On the one hand poetry is part of life. But on the other hand, poetry "can take a place outside of life." Now I can imagine someone saying that the latter remark doesn't make sense (is nonsense): if poetry is something we participate in, then it's part of life. But still, writing poetry can involve looking at "ordinary life" or "the real world" from a reflective--we might be tempted to say "outside"--perspective, that problematizes or celebrates or in some other way calls some kind of attention to things that normally pass unnoticed. But is to speak of this as taking place "outside of life" itself an example of secondary sense?

And given some of your examples relating to how we talk about agency and mind, I'm not sure if the original suggestion that to speak in a figurative or secondary sense is to use an expression that we don't "have a life with"--we "speak from the heart," "search our minds," etc. quite regularly in everyday talk. So poetic expression is part of ordinary everyday life. I think this is what I'm worried about--the idea that we don't "have a life with" these unusual expressions is itself an expression that I'm not quite grasping--or if I am grasping the underlying idea, I don't believe it. We don't have a life with "Wednesday is fat," but perhaps we might have if a poet had put this strange expression to work in some way or another. (Such uses of words perhaps "come to life" when someone shows us a way in which we might use them. Maybe this is why W's strange examples don't seem very tenable on their own?)

reshef

8/14/2013 05:16:49 am

Thanks Matt. These are really helpful questions.

Let me begin from what you say in the second paragraph. You are certainly right in saying that we use expressions like ‘speak from the heart’ and ‘search our minds’ regularly. I do not deny that those expressions have non-secondary uses. My point depends on the fact that it is POSSIBLE for them to have a secondary use, and that they sometimes do. I had a blog entry about this a year ago: “Secondary and Absolute Uses of Terms – the Problem of Examples.” The expressions that you mentioned, and the expressions I mentioned all have other-than-secondary uses.

Now, these expressions all also have secondary uses. And if I understand, the problem you raise for me is to decide whether WHEN THEY ARE SO USED we have a life with them or not. My suggestion was in a way that this is a kind of grey area: that we use them in such contexts (have a life with them) in the sense that we use them to mark what kind of life with them we need but don’t have. And I think this leads to the issues you raise in the first paragraph about “in” and “out,” so let me try to say something about that, although I’m not sure I’m completely up to it.

Cont.

Reply

reshef

8/14/2013 05:17:12 am

What needs clarification here, I think, is this talk of inside and outside life. Here is my best shot: First, it seems to me clear that the inside and outside here are not like inside and outside a box. It is more similar to inside and outside a game: a move that is a move in the game (castling), and a move that is not (throwing the rook at your opponent). And it seems to me that this is still a literal meaning of “in” and “out”—not the same literal meaning as in the case of the box, but literal nonetheless.

So a game is a better object of comparison, it seems. However, it is not perfect, because life is not a game. It doesn’t have rules. So I need to look somewhere else. Let me suggest this: There are things that are in our world or life, and things that are not. So, for instance, I can get dressed wearing a jumpsuit, even though I never do. This possibility is “in” my life. In contrast, I cannot get dressed wearing a toga. For me this would not be “getting dressed”; it would be something else. Likewise, I cannot wait for the Tooth-Fairy, or use old fashioned slang words. Do these examples give a good enough sense of what is in and what is not in our life? If so, I think this gives yet another literal (not metaphorical, and not secondary) sense to “in” and “out.”

All this does not yet help to determine if looking at life from a reflective perspective is in or out. My sense is that it is sort of both, and if this is right, then perhaps this shows that it is secondary. It is “in” insofar as it is something that we do not feel foreign doing, like wearing togas. But my sense is that it is never something that we can do just as a matter of course. It is the sort of activity that HAS to feel a bit foreign, and in this sense it is out. And then again, it is a necessary activity. It is an activity that we are naturally inclined to do sometimes, even though it feels a bit foreign, so it is unlike other activities that are out.

So I am inclined to say yes to your suggestion that saying that this activity takes place outside here uses “outside” in some secondary sense. But I am inclined to say the same about saying of this activity—to the extent that we want to say this—that it is in. – Does this sound plausible?

Reply

Matt

8/15/2013 04:16:53 am

Reshef-- I think I want to put aside the question of where to locate (in or out) the reflective activity that can give rise to secondary uses of terms, and get back to this notion of using an expression in a way that gets at the life we don't have and yet (somehow) need with the expression.

Suppose an atheist makes use of God-talk, say, adopts something like a fictionalist account of the idea of God as specifying an ideal limit (e.g. in ethics--God as an impartial judge and ideal spectator), and says things like, God knows what is right and why, God doesn't command arbitrarily, etc. It seems like a case where on the one hand, the person "needs" (or, finds it immensely helpful?) the idea of God to fix the reference of certain claims about the objectivity of certain ethical claims or principles, and yet this person does not "have a life" with these expressions about God because he or she doesn't in fact believe there is a God. (It seems that Wittgenstein and/or Murdoch might be examples of people in a position like this.) This person might have the sense of not knowing how to express what he or she wants to express about ethics without appealing to the idea of God even though he or she doesn't "literally" believe that God exists.

Is THAT a useful illustration of what you had in mind in the original post?

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reshef

8/15/2013 07:01:30 am

I’m not sure. I’m not sure I have a good enough sense of where the atheist you are describing is coming from. Perhaps that’s because I find it hard to identify with this atheist. But perhaps this is because I’m not sure that someone who is a believer would take themselves to have anything better, language-wise, with which to speak about God.

Perhaps I can say something like this (and thanks so much for pressing me on this): What I’d like to criticize is a kind of sneaking-up on nonsense use of language. That is, if someone finds something inexpressible, I think it would be cheating if they then just said “No problem; I’ll just use expressions in a secondary sense to express it.” That would be to fail to take seriously that something is inexpressible, to cover up the fact that something is inexpressible—as if one could sneak up on nonsense from behind. I also think it fails to have one’s own intentions in clear view. That, I think in hindsight, is the main reason why I felt the need to emphasize the sense in which secondary uses of language are nonsense.

Using expressions in a secondary sense is not a way of making sense of something, at least if “making sense” is taken literally. It LOOKS like a way of making sense of something. It feels like it. But it is useful to think of it rather as a way in which something escapes our ability to make sense of it: an expression of the realization that this is what happens, that something in the world is not thinkable, that we cannot accommodate it in our world, that our world doesn't have the appropriate dimensions of sense as it were.

What we “need” in such cases may be different from the way it appears to us. It appears to us in such cases that we need to make sense of something. It appears to us, that is, that there is SOMETHING we want to express. My claim, if it makes any sense, is that our real need here is rather to express the way in which something escapes our ability to make sense of it. In such cases, that’s why we reach for expressions like “God” or “omniscience” or even “law”: to express how things escape us. And this implies a kind of uncertainty whether there is something we want to express in the first place. This is part of our intention when using language in secondary sense, even if we don’t recognize it.

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Matt

8/15/2013 01:37:36 pm

Everything you say in the last paragraph above is helpful, I think, except for the final sentence. I'm not sure about attributing an unrecognized intention; that seems to belie the (striking) suggestion you make that although we (mistakenly) think we are trying to express the inexpressible, what perhaps we should (or can only) be doing is trying to "express the way in which something escapes our ability to make sense of it."

There are times, or moods, when I want to say: if you think that "words can't express" whatever you're trying to express, then perhaps you should try harder! (Or, as the mood softens, I might add: or just stop trying to express it, at least in words. Hug the person. Or write a song. Etc.) But your distinction points to different ways in which one might "try harder" to say something in such a context. I think my "try harder" reaction comes from my own trading, as it were, in words and perhaps a misguided (prideful) thought that words can serve us at all times. But then I listen to powerful music or look at great art and I have to remind myself that that's probably not true. I think I started with the question about poets because poets--if any word users do--bring language to its limit, and perhaps this is a region where language meets other arts, but then those other arts themselves cover regions where language itself perhaps cannot go. (What I just wrote feels a little cheesy; sorry.)

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reshef

8/16/2013 02:48:12 am

Is the suggestion that we may have unrecognized intentions strange in general, or is it only strange when it applies to the sort of cases we’ve been talking about? I don’t see why the suggestion would be strange only in this context, so I’ll assume you mean it is strange in general. But correct me if I’m wrong.

That we may fail to be in tune with our intentions is not something I can claim as my own idea. It is a central term of criticism for Wittgenstein—at least on a certain type of, a resolute, reading. One good example of that is given by Anscombe in her introduction to the Tractatus:

“He [Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: ‘Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?’ I replied: ‘I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.’ ‘Well,’ he asked, ‘what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?’ This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to ‘it looks as if’ in ‘it looks as if the sun goes round the earth’. My reply was to hold out my hands with the palms upward, and raise them from my knees in a circular sweep, at the same time leaning backwards and assuming a dizzy expression. ‘Exactly!’ he said. In another case, I might have found that I could not supply any meaning other than that suggested by a naïve conception, which could be destroyed by a question. The naive conception is really thoughtlessness, but it may take the power of a Copernicus effectively to call it in question.

I take this example to show how someone may have a false sense that they mean something. Here is Cavell on the same theme:

““Not saying anything” is one way philosophers do not know what they mean. In this case it is not that they mean something other than they say, but that they do not see that they mean nothing (that they mean nothing, not that their statements mean nothing, are nonsense). The extent to which this is, or seems to be, true, is astonishing” (CR, 210).

Cont.

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reshef

8/16/2013 02:48:51 am

I don’t know how to judge in a particular case—what the criterion is—if someone should just try harder to express themselves, or whether they really have nothing to say. I guess one could help them decide by offering them particular reformulations of what they are saying, and see what they accept and what they reject. – That would be helping them to clarify their own intentions, or lack thereof. My claim just depends on there being a difference between the two sorts of cases.

Now, in the Anscombe case above, we may say that a picture forced itself on her. Wittgenstein’s response took that force away; it took the life out of her expression. That is, she gave up the picture, she saw it was useless—it was not enough to animate any intention of hers. In contrast, the kind of uses I’m interested in—the secondary kind of uses—are like that of in the Anscombe example, in the sense that they are also cases in which a picture forces itself on us. They are unlike the Anscombe case in that we would still tend to cling to the picture even if we realized there was nothing we meant by it (in PI, p. 215 Wittgenstein talks about such a case). And it is not necessary that we realize this. My claim is that this clinging is not a sign that we really mean something, and my suggestion is that we cling here for a good reason: to express how something escapes our powers of expression.

Perhaps I should note that there are different sorts of cases in which words may seem to fail us. I haven’t thought about that enough, so what I’m about to say is very uncertain. The difficulty of describing the aroma of a cup of coffee is different from the difficulty of explaining what we mean when we say that e is brighter than u. In both cases we may resort to figurative ways of expression, and in both cases we lack, I think, a clear sense of what “describing” or “explaining” would amount to, and we may thus have to become inventive. We may in both cases end up using words in a secondary sense. But my sense is that in the coffee aroma case we may just as well come up with a new method of description that would satisfy us (we may, for instance, invent words we currently don’t have for different kinds of tastes and smells). In the vowels case, it is part of the grammar of the case that no such method would satisfy us. Perhaps my examples are bad, but at any rate, there seems to me to be a difference between (1) those cases in which we don’t have method of description, but can invent one, and (2) those cases in which the lack of such a method is essential.

I can’t thank you enough for making me go into this detail.

Reply

Matt

8/16/2013 12:54:36 pm

Your response helps, I think. I may have had a narrower sense of intention in mind than you. But again, where you say that of the cases you have in mind, "They are unlike the Anscombe case in that we would still tend to cling to the picture even if we realized there was nothing we meant by it...And it is not necessary that we realize this." If you say the latter, then what difference does it make whether I cling to a nonsensical expression naively or while understanding that it's nonsense? If I'm clinging naively, then I think the intentionality of my expression refers to some kind sense, but in the enlightened case, as it were, I have a different conception of what I'm doing with the words, why I'm hanging onto them and what I'm trying to express.

But I see how you could say that a person's expressions point to a need, even if the speaker him or herself thinks he or she is "talking sense." (Perhaps we could say, "Her words showed more than they said"? Or, "Even though what he said did not, strictly speaking, make sense, it revealed something about his (or our) life with these ideas"?)

I'm glad you're finding my questions and follow-ups helpful rather than annoying! (I only dabble in this stuff now, so I'm always at risk of simply not grasping the issue!)

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reshef

8/17/2013 06:14:51 am

Part of why this discussion as a whole matters to me is that it shows what it might take to clarify our own intentions. First, there is no Cartesian transparency that allows me to see my intentions. And second, clarifying intentions is really a matter of clarifying propositions. But this itself can take more than one form.

In any case, I do indeed think it is useful sometimes to speak of a gap between us and our intentions, or a gap between what we need to say, and our actual life with the language we have—where this gap can take many forms. In particular, it can take the form of (1) naively not realizing that what one is saying doesn’t make any sense; and it can take the form of (2) noting the difference between the language we have and what we need language to do for us (the difference between the sense we are capable of making and the sense we need to be able to make of things).